From the 'African Book' to Under Kilimanjaro: An Introduction

Figure 1.

Photograph by Mary Hemingway. Courtesy of the John F. Kennedy Library, Boston, MA.

Under Kilimanjaro has an unusual publishing history that relates integrally both to the establishment of the Ernest Hemingway Foundation and Society and the Hemingway Papers housed at the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library in Boston. Hemingway's widow and executrix Mary Hemingway established the Ernest Hemingway Foundation in 1965 "for the purposes of awakening, sustaining an interest in, promoting, fostering, stimulating, improving and developing literature and all forms of literary composition and expression." She had also decided, by the following decade, to donate Hemingway materials to the JFK Library, which she designated in 1978 as the official repository for the Hemingway Papers. In 1980 a group of Hemingway scholars gathered at Thompson Island in Boston Harbor, offshore from the JFK Library, to assess the significance of this gift. From that gathering came the establishment of the Hemingway Society, committed to supporting and fostering Hemingway scholarship. Recognizing the compatibility of the Society's and the Foundation's goals in emphasizing "the promotion, assistance and coordination of scholarship and studies relating to the works and life of the late Ernest Hemingway," Hemingway's sons Patrick and John invited the Society to assume the duties, resources, and functions of the Foundation upon the death of Mary Hemingway in 1986.

An important aspect of these responsibilities involves managing stipulated Hemingway copyrights in the United States as related to previously unpublished letters and manuscripts. That charge included the manuscript that Hemingway started in late 1954 following his and Mary's African safari that began in September 1953, and ended abruptly with two back-to-back plane crashes on 23 and 24 January 1954. Hemingway worked steadily throughout 1955 on the manuscript that he had begun to refer to as his "African book." He had nearly completed it when he became diverted, in early 1956, by the filming of The Old Man and the Sea, coupled with the unexpected recovery in Paris of some of his earliest manuscripts (an event that no doubt triggered his thinking about Paris and helped to inspire what would become A Moveable Feast). Although Hemingway neither finished nor titled his "African book," Robert W. Lewis and Robert E. Fleming, the editors of the Under Kilimanjaro edition, argue that the manuscript does not seem "incomplete or flawed." Instead, with the book ending "as it began, in media res, omitting the anticlimax of the two nearly fatal airplane crashes, its major conflicts are resolved, its themes fully explored." As Lewis and Fleming conclude, we are lucky to have "perhaps the last gift left to us by a literary master."

In 1987 the newly reconfigured board of the Ernest Hemingway Foundation convened in New York City. It was comprised of those, including myself, who had already been elected as officers and representatives of The Hemingway Society, and a good portion of our first deliberations related to Hemingway's "African book," which scholars had been referring to more generally as Hemingway's "African journal." Asked to review the manuscript so as to make recommendations regarding its potential for posthumous publication, we each read the roughly 850-page text. The manuscript defied my expectations. Rather than the scattershot randomness I would have expected of a "journal," the sustained narrative with its structural and thematic unity, including its consistent voice (wry and understated) and its carefully delineated characters, caught me off guard (in all the ways that Hemingway's writing, at its best, makes us catch our breath). I could not put it down. But then the Foundation's discussion regarding the manuscript's future got put on hold until courts could determine more specifically the Foundation's obligations in relation to Hemingway's manuscripts and the Hemingway Estate.

Hoping to bring out an abridged version of Hemingway's "African book," Patrick Hemingway and the Hemingway Estate, as well as the Hemingway Foundation, agreed in 1997 to a two-part publishing plan. Following the 1999 trade publication with Scribner...